Breakdown to Breakthrough

Audio File

Text transcript

From breakdown to breakthrough, or the metamorphosis of ministry. I’m just going to read three passages of scripture. The first one is in 1 Corinthians 15, verse 45, and it says, So it is written, The first man Adam became a living being, the last Adam a life-giving spirit.

The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that, the spiritual. And then the book of Romans, chapter 12, reading verse 1, I urge you therefore, brothers and sisters, because of the compassions of God, to offer your bodies specifically as a living sacrifice, dedicated completely to pleasing God, which is a logical thing for you to do, and do not allow yourself to be molded by the world system, but be in a process of being transformed, from the Greek word metamorpho, by a total renovation of your mind, so that you may confirm through testing what the good, pleasant, and complete will of God is. And the last verse, John chapter 12, and verse 24, Most assuredly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it produces much fruit.

This message is especially for those of you who’ve been facing a lot of change and difficulty in your life, and some breakdowns. Things have been going smoothly for a while, but suddenly they’re not working anymore. Suddenly you’re not comfortable doing things that you did before.

Your ministry seems to struggle, and you don’t seem to be able to be as free in serving the Lord and ministering as you used to. It seems like more and more things are coming against you, and things are being broken down. And you’re struggling to break through.

You’re thinking, oh, if only I could get back to where I was, or if only I could go forward and improve and minister more effectively and more powerfully for the Lord. So if any of these things have been your experience, you’ll, I think, get something from my message tonight. Our lives follow a regular pattern.

We are born, and we grow up, and we mature, and we run our lifespan, some shorter, some longer, and then our life ends with death. And along the way, there are several stages of development that we go through. There’s the early stages of development.

There’s the toddler years, the adolescent years, and then the adult years. And that’s our natural life. But our spiritual life, and especially our ministry, can follow very different patterns and stages to our natural life.

And that’s what I want to look at tonight. And to understand this fully, we need to look at some of the stages that other forms of creation go through. Probably the most common is the stages of life in that beautiful creature which we know as the butterfly.

Butterflies are such beautiful creatures. You know, as kids, we want to try and catch them, but they flit away, and we can’t get a hold of them because they’re so beautiful. We’d love to just capture one and hold it in our hands.

Now, the butterfly starts out in life in a very different way to what it ends up. The stages of the development of a butterfly are known as metamorphosis or transformation. It goes through several stages.

Now, the stages of a butterfly are actually very similar to the stages that we go through in the development of our ministry or our calling. So if you desire to work for the Lord and minister for Him, and if you desire to fulfill His calling on your life, I think you’re going to learn a lot by looking at what a butterfly goes through to reach its final destination, and you’ll see that there’s a lot of allegories there which suit our experience along the way in moving forward into that place where God can really use us and where we can fulfill our calling. Now, for some years, I’ve been preaching a topic which God gave a revelation on, and I called it the birth, the death, and the resurrection of a vision.

As believers, we become identified with Jesus in His birth, in His death, and in His resurrection. When we are born again, we are identifying with His birth. But there comes a process in life where things come to a standstill, where we face a kind of a spiritual death.

Now, that may involve dying to my own ability or my own strength, but especially when it comes to the vision, it means that I start out with a great vision and a passion and an excitement. I’m going to work for the Lord. I’m going to do great things for God.

Yeah, I’m going to conquer the world. And we start off with a big bang, and after the bang, it’s like you just burst a balloon. There’s nothing left.

It just dies, and you stand there thinking, no, I had so many big ideas, but they’re all gone. It’s all dead. Where do I go from here? Now, there’s a very important reason for this experience, and it is a very common experience, and actually it’s totally scriptural because, you see, the idea of birth, death, and resurrection is that there is a process of improvement.

Now, again, if we go back to nature, because as the Scripture says, first the natural, then the spiritual, we read that a grain of wheat must fall into the ground and die first. When it dies, it then sprouts, it germinates, and comes to life, and it produces a tree which makes lots and lots of grains. In order for that little grain to expand into the huge harvest of grain, it has to go through a process of death.

Now, nobody likes death. We certainly don’t like death in this natural world. We avoid it as much as we can.

Unfortunately, it catches up with us at times, and we have to face it. But we start out with the birth of a vision. The Lord gives you an idea, a concept of perhaps what you’d like to do.

Maybe you have a vision of standing up and preaching. I never had this when I grew up as a believer because I wasn’t thinking of ministry until the Lord anointed me and baptized me in the Holy Spirit. And then suddenly I got all excited, and I could see myself moving in the Spirit.

I could see myself standing up and preaching to people, calling them forward and laying hands on them and praying for them. Wow! Wouldn’t that be exciting? Little old me, I was a little nobody sitting in the back. But I got excited about this idea.

Could I do it? Well, in the natural, I couldn’t do it. I was a weak, insecure little wimp. But with His power on me now, I got a new excitement.

I got a new vision. I got a new passion. I thought, I’m going to go to Bible school, and I’m going to study, and I’m going to go into ministry, and I’m going to do great things for the Lord.

And the vision was born. And then over time, things begin to get in the way. Problems come.

You try, and you fail. I tried to go to Bible school, and I couldn’t. All the doors closed, and I eventually came to the point where I thought, this whole ministry idea was just a bad idea.

It was just a fantasy. My vision died, totally died. And the Lord had to bring me to a place where He said, I want you to let go of that old vision, because I’ve called you to something very different.

What was that? Well, I tried a whole lot of different things. I remember in the church at that time, there was a lot of people who were manifesting demons, and the pastor was great at the whole deliverance ministry and casting demons out. And I saw demons speaking through people back to the minister and saying, I’m not going to come out.

She belongs to me. And I thought, wow, I would love to have the power and authority to stand up there and say, demon, you come out in Jesus’ name. And to see that person set free, I got so excited about it, I got a vision for a deliverance ministry.

I was going to help people break free. I tell you what, in the past, to call people forward for prayer, I wanted to go up there and pray. But who was I? I was a little nobody sitting in the pew.

I was not a qualified minister, and he was not going to exactly allow me to go up there and minister to his people. So I did it behind his back. I started ministering to people on the sidelines.

People began to share with me some of their problems, and I knew. I knew they needed deliverance, and I knew God had anointed me and given me the authority and the power to do it. So I began to pray for people.

I remember this one old sister in the church. She was a bit of a weirdo, and I tried to pray with her, and I saw, man, there were heavy demons in there. And I identified a demon, and I tried to rebuke it, but she wasn’t ready for deliverance.

So I missed it. It was no success, and then she ran to the pastor to say that I told her she has a certain kind of demon, and perhaps if I could tell her again what it is, maybe she could deal with it. Needless to say, I was not top of the pops in the church.

My pastor immediately got a hold of me and said, what the heck do you think you are doing trying to cast demons out of the congregation? It’s my job, not yours. Pow! Death of a vision. Well, that was just one of them.

My vision died, so I said, I guess, Lord, what am I going to do now? Well, I wanted to minister, but I wasn’t going to be allowed to preach, so the only thing we were allowed to do is to go out onto the streets and witness. And you know what? I wasn’t the kind of person who could boldly walk up and say, hi, my name’s Liz, and I’d like to tell you about Jesus. Not me.

I went and hid behind the corner. See? So I was forced to go out, and I found that there was actually only one group of people who didn’t treat you badly when you came to speak to them, and that was the black folks, the native folks of the country. None of them were ever nasty to me.

They said, I’m not interested. They listened, and they either received or they didn’t receive. And eventually, I found myself sharing the gospel with these people, and they seemed so receptive.

I eventually was so excited about ministering to them, I began to go and visit the African hospital because they allowed you in there and to go and pray with the people in beds. It was amazing. I was convinced God called me to be a missionary now because I was going to another nation, and I was going to be a missionary.

And so, unfortunately, that didn’t quite work out because there was no mission field for me to go to. I was living in a mission field. It seemed every attempt I tried for ministry, it just seemed to fold in.

Until eventually, the Lord began to take me into his word, and I just studied the word, and I learned, and I began to share the word with people. And eventually, as I finally got a chance to stand up and preach to the young people as a youth leader, people began to say to me, man, you have such a good teaching ministry. Well, I never thought of myself as a teacher.

I thought I was going to heal the sick, and I thought I was going to deliver the people. Then I thought I was going to be a missionary going off to minister to foreign nations. Now the Lord says, I’m making you a teacher.

And, you know, every time I tried it, my ministry flourished. People loved my teaching. Eventually, I found my place.

It was far more exciting than all those other goals that were never fulfilled. Now I could share the word with anybody at any time. And as I began to live things and experience things in life, and I learned to use the word to overcome my problems, I could now use the same principles to help other people.

Now you see, if my first visions had been fulfilled, I would never be where I am today, where eventually God led me to set up training schools and to train the members of ministry and leadership in the church. But God had a bigger vision for me than the little vision that I started out with. And this is the whole reason for the death of a vision, is that God has something bigger in mind.

And when we have a birth of a vision, we get so excited about it, well, I can see myself doing this the rest of my life. But God says, no, I’ve got a much bigger vision for you than that. Your thinking is too small.

Increase your vision. Increase the range of where you hope to go and what you plan to do with my anointing and my word. And so the vision grew bigger and bigger.

Well, then my next goal was I had to go into ministry. I had to become a pastor. Oh, I wanted to become a pastor, but you know what? You don’t just walk in somewhere and say, hey, I’d like to be your pastor.

Don’t end that way. You’ve got to be recognized by the leadership of your church, and they’ve got to say, well, there’s a church over there that doesn’t have a pastor. And so we’d like to send you to be their pastor.

Well, nobody wanted to do that. So I left the church where I was and joined another one and another one. Eventually, I settled in a place where they gave me opportunity every now and then to preach and minister.

And one day the pastor said to me, Les, we see the call of God on your life, and we’d like to put you into ministry. Now, before that happened, I’d come to the place where I gave up. I thought, well, you know what? Ever since I left school, I lost all idea of a career.

All I could see was myself preaching. And I remember the boss that I had originally said to me, he said, you’re an idiot. He said, you’re so intelligent, you should go and register for articles and become an accountant or something, man.

He said, I’m going to have you fired so you can go and study and I wanted to be a preacher. I wanted to be a minister. Well, eventually, once all the doors closed and all the visions died, I thought, okay, let me go and apply the accounting division of the company I was working with and see if I can get trained to be an accountant.

I really was not interested. I loved mathematics and figures, but accountant, man. But there was money in it.

I could become famous. I could become important. Well, that meant a lot to me because I was an insecure little nobody.

So I thought, okay, I will change my job and start in accounting. And they said, okay, to do that, we’ve got to send you to a city in the distance and you’ve got to start at the bottom as an ordinary little clerk, an ordinary accounting clerk and just do routine paperwork. Okay, that’s what it cost.

It was a new vision. It was exciting. Maybe they’ll send me to university.

By the time I got there, I found out, man, I was working for a big organization and when I tried to get excited about where I was going to go, somebody sat me down the one day and said, Liz, you’re working for a government organization now. Just go to work. Do your job and get paid at the end of the month.

In time your salary will increase and one day you can retire. Stop trying to stir the boat. Just be.

Well, no, that wasn’t my vision. My vision was to do something exciting, but it all died. And, yeah, I sat again.

I couldn’t even fulfill a vision in the secular field that learned ministry and just as I was at that point, the pastor of the church came and he said, we’ve seen your ministry and your calling and we’ve decided we’re going to put you into ministry. Yay! They gave me my own church, a little country church on the border of the country where at that time there was a terrorist war and people were getting killed. Mortar bombs were going off all the time.

We heard them every night. We were right on a border and the terrorists were coming in. But I got my own church with about five members.

It was a big church at one time, but all the big names had been there and even they failed to build a church there. And here was Liz Cross. You’re going to come as the great teacher and build the church.

Well, they didn’t need a teacher. They needed more of an evangelist and an apostle and even a pastor. And I wasn’t any of those things yet, see.

So my vision once again died. And I thought, you know, all I ever really wanted to do was to teach. Maybe I could join a Bible school as a lecturer and just be a lecturer and teach.

That would really be great. So they called me back to the main church in the country and I worked as an assistant pastor with the main pastor there for a while. And I got a lot of chance to share the word and people loved my teaching.

And I thought, at last, I’m going to have an opportunity. But no, no, there was still that original vision, the passion of me rising up just didn’t happen. Death of a vision again and again.

And eventually, with the political change in the country, I had to leave. It was a country to the north of us at that time known as Rhodesia and I had to come to South Africa where there was nothing. And I’ve told my story so many places.

I’m not going to give you the whole story. What I’m just trying to share with you is I went through many stages of birth of a vision and then death of a vision, resurrection of a vision, yay, death of a vision, resurrection of a vision, death of a vision. I found that the cycle gets repeated many times and each new vision starts out like a resurrection.

But inevitably, it ends up in, you said it, death. It reaches its greatest potential and then it becomes an obstacle because you see God has a bigger vision for you and that’s why you need the resurrection of a vision. Well, I found this happened so many times I was afraid to get a new vision because I knew it was just a matter of time as I plunge into this new vision, get excited about it, God’s going to say, no, let it die.

Oh, Lord, it’s been the story of my life. Well, here’s the question. How many times does this happen in our experience? And is that an easy answer? Well, I’d like to suggest that it depends on how high your calling is destined to go.

See, there may be sub-stages before you reach your final stage and these stages could actually take up most of your life and your ministry development. Now, let’s go back and compare what happens in nature and see how similar it is. I studied metamorphosis and the cycle of the butterfly and everything when I was younger.

I still remember collecting silkworms and feeding them mulberry leaves and watching them eventually spin themselves into a cocoon to become a butterfly. But I never really actually studied it in detail until now because I thought this is such a perfect picture of this whole process. And I discovered some things in the actual cycle of the butterfly that I wasn’t aware of before.

But when I saw them, I realized they fit exactly in line with our experience in these things that happen in our lives. I’m going to go through them very quickly with you. And as I share with you what happens in the natural, I want you to compare it with what’s happened in your own spiritual experience and you’re going to find so many similarities.

Okay, the butterfly starts out in life as a worm. Starts out as a worm. Well, have you got aspirations to be a butterfly? Yay, a beautiful, pretty butterfly that can fly all over the place.

Here’s the bad news. You start as a worm, an ishy, squishy, ugly little worm. Oh, do I have to? Can’t I just be born a butterfly? No, the butterflies aren’t born.

Worms are born. See, and that worm that gets born out of the eggs that the butterflies lay, it has a huge appetite and it eats like crazy. Whichever leaf of the plant is there, it eats and eats and eats and eats and it grows like mad from all that eating.

But it’s not ready to be a butterfly yet. Because there’s a few stages that the caterpillar has to go through before it’s ready to face that final change that will transform it from a caterpillar into a butterfly. And that final stage, if you think about it, is kind of like the birth, the death, and the resurrection.

You see, because the resurrection is always greater than the original birth. The resurrection is usually different to the original vision. Now, here’s what happens.

That old caterpillar, he gets in there and he gorges himself on all the leaves that he can get, usually mulberry leaves, their favorite. And he grows like crazy. But that growth reaches a climax.

It reaches a climax. And what happens is, as the butterfly continues to eat, it wants to get bigger, but it discovers that the body that it’s in actually has become hard and rigid. And you can feed a lot of stuff in that, but all you’re doing is you’re compressing the stuff inside this hard, rigid shell.

The only way that the caterpillar can grow is to get rid of that shell and start a new one. So we have a process which is known as molting. Now, a lot of creatures, especially insects, go through this molting process.

Snakes go through it where they crawl out of their skin and then grow a new skin. But the caterpillar especially, it sheds this shell that’s around it, breaks out of it, and forms a new shell on the inside that is soft and can grow. And the caterpillar now can grow larger.

And that doesn’t just happen once. It happens many, many times. Okay? Now, what you’ve got after this is not a different creature.

You’ve got the same caterpillar, it’s just bigger. It hasn’t transformed into a butterfly. It’s still just a caterpillar, but it’s got more potential, and it’s bigger.

Now, you’re going to find in your spiritual experience that you’re going to go through this exact same thing. You’re going to grow like crazy with your new vision and your excitement and what you’re going to do for the Lord, and then you’re going to hit a plateau, where somehow you just can’t get any further. You can’t seem to get any higher.

You can’t get more anointing. You can’t get more knowledge of the word. It’s like you’ve become saturated, and you want to go higher.

You come to this hill, this big hill way up there like a mountain. And you say, I want to get up there so I can be in a higher place. Now, how do you do that? In the natural, you’ve got all this climbing gear and all the backpacks and everything you’ve been carrying with you, and now you want to scale this steep mountain cliff.

Do you know what? You’re not going to make it with all that kit and gear on you. So you know what you’ve got to do? You’ve got to dump it. Drop my backpack and all my provisions.

Drop my sticks. Drop all the tools that I’ve been using until now. And almost naked, you climb that mountain.

And now you pour all your strength into climbing that mountain. And when you get to the top, you find there’s some new tools up there that you begin to pick up along the way, and you begin to grow again, and you begin to accumulate new abilities and new skills, and you continue on your journey until you reach the next peak, and the process repeats itself again. So in order for you to go from this level to the next level, you have to dump what you’ve been depending on.

Now, you say, well, that sounds like a death of a vision to me. It kind of is, but it’s not. The reason it’s not a death of a vision is because the resurrection is not going to mean you’re no longer a worm.

It just means you’re going to now be a bigger worm. So you may have faced many of these experiences in life where you kind of reach the plateau in your spiritual life, and you think, Lord, I can’t seem to go any further. I need more anointing.

I need more knowledge of the Word. I need more abilities, Lord. Maybe I can go to Bible school and study a bit and learn more and qualify to rise to a higher ministry level.

But actually, the starting point is to let go of what you have, and that’s not easy because you’ve relied on these things for so long. You’ve developed natural skills and abilities. You even learned how to stand up and preach, and people liked it and they enjoyed it, but now you’ve got to let it go.

Okay. Many stages of molting the caterpillar goes through before it can become a butterfly. You may think, well, yeah, I understand the concept of birth, death, and resurrection.

Man, I’ve been through it. I’m going through it right now. Are you? Are you going through a death leading to a resurrection, or are you simply going through a molting period where the Lord wants to increase you, and to do that you’ve got to let go? You know, it’s like you’ve got this old garment and you want to become the Hulk.

The moment the Hulk rises up, you’ve got to get new clothes every time because it smashes the old stuff. It doesn’t fit him anymore, and that’s exactly what’s going to happen to you. If you want to become a spiritual Hulk, you’re going to have to give up the clothing that you have been wearing.

You’re going to have to give up the natural and the spiritual abilities that you’ve already developed. Now, many of you that I’m speaking to right now, that’s where you’re at. God’s trying to stretch you.

He’s trying to stretch you and make you bigger. He’s trying to push you to go beyond what you’ve done until now, but it’s going to cost you. There’s a price to pay for it, and that price is you’re going to have to let go of all the things that you depend on, all your natural skills, all your natural knowledge and ability.

You’re going to have to treat it as dross. Paul said, The things that were gained to me I counted as loss. See, that’s a process not of death yet but of molting.

Now, I’ve never taught this before because I only knew birth, death, and resurrection. And that’s why I started to get confused every time I went through this and I got a new vision. I said, Yay, I’ve got the resurrection.

There’s a new vision. Here we go. Wham, bam.

The same thing happens again. You reach a plateau. You can’t go any further.

I don’t want to discourage you. I thought I’d been through the resurrection. Perhaps you have.

Perhaps you haven’t. By the time I’m finished, I think you’ll understand a bit better exactly what the resurrection really is. And maybe you’re going to be more ready to face the real death and the real resurrection.

Okay? The big mistake we make is we get a vision and we think, This is my calling. I can see me doing this the rest of my life. See, I thought my ministry was going to be deliverance.

That’s me. I’m the deliverance expert. I’m going to be doing this the rest of my life.

Or I’m going to be a missionary. Or I’m going to be God’s teacher. I’m going to teach people for the rest of my life.

But God changed it. He changed it many times. Eventually, I didn’t know what it called me to be.

Because you know what? I could do a whole lot of these things. I was getting prophetic. Then I was becoming a teacher.

Now I’m supposed to be an apostle? What about evangelism? What about being a pastor? They’re all part and parcel of the same thing. Well, which one did he call me to be? It seems like God can’t make up his mind. He keeps changing his mind.

He keeps switching things. He keeps moving me. He keeps taking me through a transition into something new.

Perhaps you’re destined to be a butterfly. Not just a big caterpillar. If you are, you’re going to face the ultimate transition.

That’s really the main thing I want to look at here. How do you move from being a caterpillar to a butterfly? That’s a whole new ballgame, man. That’s a very drastic change.

You’ve got to go into the next stage beyond melting. It’s called the chrysalis stage. That’s where you become bound up in a cocoon.

You think it was bad before facing the restriction of your old hard shell that you had to break out of. No, no. Now you’re wrapped around with a cocoon.

You can’t even be seen anymore. You’re totally hidden away and you actually can’t do anything except just lie there. Here’s what happens when the worm moves into the chrysalis.

It faces total breakdown. You think you’ve been through some breakdowns. You’re still crying saying, Lord, I need a breakthrough.

Maybe your breakthrough is just a melting period. God wants to take you further. But the ultimate breakdown leads to the ultimate breakthrough.

The first thing that happens to this worm as it enters into the chrysalis and the cocoon is it totally digests itself. It totally digests itself. It just becomes a pile of liquid.

That’s it. It doesn’t even have any real shape or form anymore. But inside that cocoon, that liquid begins to transform into a totally new creature.

From that liquid begins to come wings and legs and everything that a butterfly has, including the process that it uses to suck nectar and to eat with. It’s a totally different creature to the caterpillar. Now, if you look at that from the outside, you can only come to one conclusion.

The caterpillar is dead. It’s dead. It’s not even moving anymore.

It’s just a pile of liquid lying there in a cocoon. If you break open the cocoon, it’s going to spill the liquid. There isn’t even a creature in there anymore.

This caterpillar is not doing anything anymore. It’s not even eating anymore. It’s not moving.

It’s not doing anything. It’s just lying there waiting to be transformed and changed into something new. This stage, folks, is the ultimate breakdown.

Now, if you are content to be a caterpillar, albeit a bigger one, then be happy with where you are. But if you’re like me, I wasn’t satisfied. I wanted more, Lord.

I want more. So God called me to the ultimate stage of the chrysalis. And the first thing he did to me, as he said, Lord, with all this ministry that you’ve built up, all of your training schools and everything you’ve done, I want you to just let it go and give it away to somebody else.

Okay, so what do I do, Lord? Nothing. Hang on, Lord. You know, this is what I do.

This is my job. This is how we get our income. What do I do, Lord? I’ve been through this many times where I thought, now I’m in the place where I can move forward for the Lord.

And he says, Stop. Let it go. I remember once while we were still in Mexico, we tried to form an online fellowship since we couldn’t have a real live church.

And I had great hopes for it. And it seemed to be growing. And then one day the Lord said, Close it down.

Kill it. I said, Lord, but, you know, you gave me that vision. Lord, it’s an exciting vision.

Now you want me to kill it? He said, Close it down. Well, here we are. We’ve been bragging to everybody what we were going to accomplish.

We had no right to say, Guys, this fellowship is now no longer functional. We’re closing it down. Somebody wrote me and said, I’m glad the Lord answered my prayer because I asked him to close down your ministry because I don’t believe it’s of him.

Thank you very much. Talk about death. It was the end.

It was the end. Okay, folks, now, finally, we’re coming to the true death of a vision and the true resurrection. For me, my boast was in my teaching ministry, which I’ve done for so many years, and God had raised me up not only just to teach his word but to teach those at the highest level to train his leaders that they may rise up and build the new church.

Wow. I became a highly professional teacher now, training people, not even just ordinary pastors, higher level people, great men and women of God. These are the people I was aiming for.

And the Lord said, Give it up. Let it go. So then what do I do, Lord? Lord, my boast is in the word.

My boast is in teaching the word, instructing people on how to live the spiritual life and how to do ministry according to your word. Where do I go from here? And he said, Now you’re going to move. See that old caterpillar, he loves the leaves.

He chews the leaves and eats like crazy. But you know what a butterfly eats? Nectar. The butterfly goes and sucks the beautiful sweet stuff out of all the flowers and lives on the goodies.

Now what does this speak about? I think it speaks about the anointing of God. I think it speaks about revival. I think it speaks about God’s wonder and presence.

And so I realized the Lord was saying to me, Let go of your reliance on your teaching ability and become totally dependent on me and my spirit and my anointing. Well, Lord, I’ve never done that before. I’m not even sure I know how to do it.

And he said, I don’t need you to know how to do it. I just need you to let me do it. Are you prepared to let it go? Now I’ll ask you that same question now.

You’ve reached a certain stage in your spiritual maturity, in your ministry experience where you perhaps think, Well, I’m qualified to be a prophet now. I’m qualified to be an apostle now. I’ve arrived at that place.

What if God were to say to you, I’m putting you in a chrysalis. I’m putting you in a cocoon and I’m going to transform you and take you to a totally new and different way of ministering. What’s your response going to be? Well, here’s the bad news.

When that caterpillar who’s unwittingly spun himself into a cocoon, finds himself into that cocoon, all his power got took away. There’s only one thing he can do and that’s dissolve himself and lie there helpless, waiting, waiting, for the moment when the butterfly has been formed and is ready to chew its way out of that cocoon, dry its wings and go for a beautiful flight into the garden. Really start living now, not stuck as a worm to a little tree in a leaf, but able to fly on the wind of God’s spirits, to be able to go places and to soar in His presence.

Wow, I feel the anointing on that. Don’t you want to go there? Aren’t you tired of being a worm? I really enjoy chewing these leaves. I’m having a good meal here.

I’m okay. I’m okay. I grow a little bit every now and then.

I have to let go of everything and I grow some more. It’s okay. I’m getting bigger.

I’m a great big comfortable worm right now. I’d rather be a butterfly, don’t you? But if you can’t get to be a worm, the rest of my message is not for you. You may go home now, but I’ve got a feeling there’s something deeper in you.

I’ve got a feeling there’s a passion deep inside you that says, I want more. I’m not satisfied with what God’s given me until now. I’m not satisfied with what God’s done in me until now.

Welcome, future butterfly. You’re on your way. Now you’re going to understand what death truly is.

You see, we now go through our own metamorphosis. After we’ve gone through that breakdown, we finally come to the place where we have a breakthrough, and you break through out of that cocoon. Now comes, folks, the true resurrection of a vision.

The resurrection is always greater than the original vision, and usually it actually even looks totally different to what the original vision looked like. So in ministry, it might mean you take a totally new approach to ministry. You see, the breakdown of the original has led to your breakthrough, and yet you’ve been moaning and complaining.

You say, Lord, it’s not fair. Lord, everything is going wrong. Everything is breaking down.

Lord, where are you? The Lord says, do you want to stay a worm, or do you want to become a butterfly? Because if you want to become a butterfly, boy, you’re going to have to change. Change, change. If you’re analytical, that’s a swear word.

Change. But I’ve done it this way all my life. No, you’ve got to change.

You’ve got to do it differently. No longer will you be limited like the caterpillar. You’re going to fly.

You say, what about the worms? Well, the butterfly reproduces by laying eggs. Those eggs become caterpillars. You are going to birth new ministries.

You are going to birth others who will rise up and eventually, perhaps, also become a butterfly. So the question is, what stage are you in right now? If you’ve desired to be used by the Lord in ministry, you’re going to go through some of these stages. This process could take a large part of your life.

You know, Jesus spent most of his life preparing for one short span of ministry that he carried out. Paul spent a large part of his life preparing for his final calling. And those molding stages, they’re all part of the preparation stage.

You may think, well, I’ve been going through training for years. No, actually, you haven’t. You’ve been going through preparation for training.

The final transformation to butterfly is a more intensive form of training and it is your final training phase. It’s going to make you into the thing that you have desired to be and that God has called you to be. Now, what will be your final destination? Well, the Lord’s decided that.

He called me and decided, but that’s not entirely true. God offers you an opportunity and you still have some liberty to choose where you go. Paul tried to describe this to the Corinthians, and I don’t know if you can understand this passage, but I want you to examine it and think about it.

Writing to them, he says, We, however, will not boast, says this in 2 Corinthians 10, reading from verse 13. We, however, will not boast beyond proper limits, but will confine our boasting to the field God has assigned to us, a field that reaches even to you. We’re not going to go too far in our boasting, as would be the case if we had not come to you, for we did get as far as you with the gospel.

Now that we go beyond our limits by boasting of work done by others, our hope is that as your faith continues to grow, our area of activity among you will greatly expand. He says that we can preach the gospel in the regions beyond you, but we do not want to boast about work already done in another man’s territory. Paul could have said, Well, you know, I’ve made it.

I’ve formed a church here in Corinthians. I’ve accomplished my apostolic purpose. No, he said, I want more.

I want to go further. I want to go way beyond. When I first started out with the first vision God gave me, I was so excited.

I just was driven almost. I still remember saying, You know what? When I start pushing forward and aiming for the goal, then bury me because I’m dead. Well, I should have been buried by now.

I didn’t realize that I was going to go through a chrysalis, that God was going to totally transform my ministry and change it. So, folks, if you desire to be a butterfly, you can expect to go through some transitions, right? And as you consider the various stages in your ministry development, can you identify firstly where you are right now? Can you see the way that you’ve come? And can you see where you are headed in your ministry calling? I hope as you look at the metamorphosis of a butterfly and apply this to your spiritual life, I hope this allegory of a natural process of growth has helped you perhaps to understand a little bit of what’s happening in your life and ministry. I hope it’s prepared you for the next stage that you will face and that when you face that next stage, whether it be another stage of melting or whether it be a final transformation into that butterfly, into the ultimate calling that God has for you, you’ll not only be ready for it, but you’ll willingly submit to it and say, Here I am, Lord.

I give my all. I’m ready to follow You all the way. If you’ll do that, you will become everything that you’ve desired to be and everything that God has desired you to be.

In the end, you don’t have to stay as that ugly caterpillar. You can become the most beautiful butterfly that everybody admires and looks at and chases after. I don’t know about you, but I think I’d rather be a butterfly.

A butterfly is free. Nobody can capture it and put it in cages. It’s free to fly wherever it wants, and it can go and feed off all the nectar and all the good things that are out there.

Your spiritual life can be so magnificent, and instead of your life just being a yee, a boop, you’re going to end on a glorious note and say, Here we go. I’m going to go all the way for the Lord. My life is going to mean something.

My life has a purpose, and it’s going to be fulfilled, and I’m going to glorify the Lord, and I’m going to shine for Him. I don’t know about you, but I want to go. I don’t want to just end on a downward run.

I want to end on a big bang. I want to go out in glory. Amen.

So I’m aiming for the glory. I’m aiming for His revival power now. I’m waiting for the wind to catch those wings of the butterfly.

Instead of crawling along as this caterpillar trying to find some more leaves to eat, I can take to the wind, fly off wherever I want, and go to all the glorious places that God has and be an influence in this world for Him and for His glory. Amen.